This "Assistive Garment" Hoodie Hides a Wearable Fluidic Logic Circuit and Pnuematic System
Designed to provide assistance and logical computation without electricity, this is a seriously smart casual jacket.
Engineers from Rice University and Harvard University have built assistive garments from what they describe as "logic-enabled textiles" — wearable gadgets that use embedded pneumatic circuits to help those with functional limitations carry out everyday tasks.
"The idea of using fluids to construct digital logic circuits is not new," admits author Daniel Preston of the basis to his team's work. "And in fact, in the last decade, people have been moving towards implementing fluidic logic in soft materials, things like elastomers. But so far, no one had taken the step to implement it in sheet-based materials, a feat which required redesigning the entire approach from first principles."
The team's contribution to the state-of-the-art sees fluidic logic circuits integrated into fabrics, creating "assistive garments," which use logic gates to support pneumatic actuators — providing a push-button system for donning a jacket's hood, in the field-tested prototype.
"We think of the logic element as, at its most fundamental level, containing both a relay and a fluidic resistor," explains lead author Anoop Rajappan. "These would be equivalent to having an electronic relay or transistor paired with the resistor, which is the foundation of typical transistor-resistor logic."
"We think there’s a host of ways this can be implemented to help people go about their daily activities," says Preston. "One of the next areas we're looking into is sensing intent. As soon as the wearer initiates a course of action, we can then offer assistance for the remainder of that action. For example, you might start to grasp an object and if the system senses your intent, it will give you some assistance in closing your hand around that object so you can lift it up."
The prototype has proven robust, too: the pressure-controllable "fluid kink valves," measuring a square inch each, have been tested to 20,000 on-off cycles and a million flex cycles — and have passed through a washing machine 20 times unscathed. If that weren't enough, the team took the test still further: driving a car over the fabric, repeatedly, and proving it remained undamaged afterward.
The team's work has been published under closed-access terms in the journal PNAS.